So long and thanks for all the fish

Today marks the last day of my adventures at Canoo Engineering AG. Back in 2010 Canoo celebrated it’s 10th year anniversary on April 1st with a full day event; that very same day I joined the company, which gave me the opportunity to meet pretty much everyone in one day.

It’s been 8 years (plus 1 month) full of challenges and friendship; I had the opportunity to design from scratch the architecture of a systems platform used my a working group comprised of multi-national companies; helped migrate existing Java desktop solutions from Swing/SWT to JavaFX; coached teams on the intricacies of Maven and Gradle build tools; helped customers understand the benefits of contributing back to Open Source and build communities; fostered Hackergarten as a space to learn, teach, and collaborate; traveled the world meeting customers and participated at conferences/JUG events showcasing the experiences we have had along the way with a wide range of Java (and Groovy!) technologies.

To my fellow canooies (as we like to call ourselves) I bid you goodbye. I take with me fond memories of the time we spent together building solutions for our customers; the laughs we shared; the times we jumped into the Rhine during a hot summer day to later come back to the office an hour later to continue our daily work (yup, that’s a thing in Basel).